What is The Best Way to Scale My Game Dev Business?

[iivalky]

Hi Fastlaners,
You might know me from my introduction and/or article about lead developing multiple income producing video games.
Rounded, I make $100/day (give or take)
My question, to anyone familiar with marketing, scaling businesses, or even game developing is: How could I turn that $100/day into something larger, like $200, even $1000? Should I work on building a larger fanbase? Add more purchasable items? Have more incising character pack thumbnails? I'm beginning to look into my future career as a full time real estate investor more, and I want to have as much money possible when the time comes to buy my first properties.

Here are some stats which may help answer my question:

- As it currently stands, I make from about roughly $70 - $120 per day from all my games combined by selling in-game currency and character bundles.
- All of my games combined gain about 30,000 - 50,000 visitors daily
- I have 5 different price options for selling in-game currency
- I currently have 3 character packs in my largest game (which earn a few cents - a few dollars per pack)

Earning $100 per day from my games is good, but I feel like my games have a lot more potential - so any help with scaling would be appreciated!

 

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[splok]

Hi Fastlaners,
You might know me from my introduction and/or article about lead developing multiple income producing video games.
Rounded, I make $100/day (give or take)
My question, to anyone familiar with marketing, scaling businesses, or even game developing is: How could I turn that $100/day into something larger, like $200, even $1000? Should I work on building a larger fanbase? Add more purchasable items? Have more incising character pack thumbnails? I'm beginning to look into my future career as a full time real estate investor more, and I want to have as much money possible when the time comes to buy my first properties.

Here are some stats which may help answer my question:

- As it currently stands, I make from about roughly $70 - $120 per day from all my games combined by selling in-game currency and character bundles.
- All of my games combined gain about 30,000 - 50,000 visitors daily
- I have 5 different price options for selling in-game currency
- I currently have 3 character packs in my largest one (which earn a few cents - a few dollars per pack)

Earning $100 per day from my games is good, but I feel like my games have a lot more potential - so any help with scaling would be appreciated!

Very generally speaking, you can go broader or deeper. I don't know anything about your platform, but I'll guess that the lowest hanging fruit is exploiting the knowledge and traffic that you're already getting. If you aren't already, you could start split testing the design and offers on your games to try and optimize the retention and monetization. I would guess the next step would be launching more games, which it sounds like you're already working on. Don't fall into the trap of thinking every game has to be bigger than the last though. Bigger just makes it more likely that you'll never finish, and there's a complexity sweet spot for every audience (think trying to get Candy Crushers to play an RTS for example). Once your game is "enough", whatever that is, adding more can be a negative.

You can probably look at the other games on the platform and get a feel for how much upside there is in this path. Are you able to theoretically 10x or 100x (or more) your revenue per game there? or are you able to get similar revenue out of 10x or 100x more games? If so, that may be the most straightforward path. If not, you may need to explore branching out to other platforms. That can be a seriously rocky road, as I'm sure you're aware. However, if you're able to somehow harness your existing audience and get them to follow you to another platform, that could definitely give you a head start.

 

[iivalky]

Very generally speaking, you can go broader or deeper. I don't know anything about your platform, but I'll guess that the lowest hanging fruit is exploiting the knowledge and traffic that you're already getting. If you aren't already, you could start split testing the design and offers on your games to try and optimize the retention and monetization. I would guess the next step would be launching more games, which it sounds like you're already working on. Don't fall into the trap of thinking every game has to be bigger than the last though. Bigger just makes it more likely that you'll never finish, and there's a complexity sweet spot for every audience (think trying to get Candy Crushers to play an RTS for example). Once your game is "enough", whatever that is, adding more can be a negative.

You can probably look at the other games on the platform and get a feel for how much upside there is in this path. Are you able to theoretically 10x or 100x (or more) your revenue per game there? or are you able to get similar revenue out of 10x or 100x more games? If so, that may be the most straightforward path. If not, you may need to explore branching out to other platforms. That can be a seriously rocky road, as I'm sure you're aware. However, if you're able to somehow harness your existing audience and get them to follow you to another platform, that could definitely give you a head start.

Thanks for the feedback - 10xing the amount of games I own will take a while as a decent project takes a few months to fully develop but is certainly one way to do it. I will begin experimenting with new means of monetization (as you mentioned) by adding more unique characters and such - I think I may be to 2x it at the very least this way.

Again, I appreciate the thorough response!

 

[splok]

Thanks for the feedback - 10xing the amount of games I own will take a while as a decent project takes a few months to fully develop but is certainly one way to do it. I will begin experimenting with new means of monetization (as you mentioned) by adding more unique characters and such - I think I may be to 2x it at the very least this way.

Again, I appreciate the thorough response!

Just in case you aren't taking it into account, keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to start from scratch with every game. I find that lots of indie devs seem to really hate building on top of the tech that they've already built, even though that's how big studios generally work. Indies, almost by definition, like to work on what they find interesting instead of doubling down on what's effective. If you built one game about cats, do a reskin with dogs, maybe change just enough of the design to keep it a bit fresh. Or make a sequel using exactly the same tech with a few extra features or just additional content of the same type. etc. etc.

 

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